Referral Rewards
Objectives
William Hill offer a standard welcome incentive to all new customers, "Bet £10, Get £30". However, this offer isn't exclusive to William Hill since many competitors offer the same. We wanted to increase the number of new customers per month without changing the acquisition offer. The idea for a Referral Rewards scheme was born.
Hypothesis
Research suggests that referral leads convert 30% better than leads from other channels, presumably since there is already a level of trust and value associated with the brand by proxy.
The assumption was that if one of our customers were to invite one of their contacts to join William Hill that they would be 30% more likely to join than if we invited that same contact directly.
With this is mind our idea was to create a Referral Reward scheme whereby existing customers would be rewarded for inviting friends and family to set up an account at William Hill. We would track the progress of these interactions and measure the success of the referrals by using a feature in the app and on the website that would allow us to track who was being invited (and by whom) and whether or not they eventually set up an account.
A proactive social media campaign, centred around a sporting event such as the Cheltenham Festival was the ideal time to introduce the feature since the excitement and traffic around the event would be optimal.
Goals
We wanted to create a feature within the existing website/app on mobile devices which would give William Hill an advantage over competitors and increase the likelihood of potential customers opening an account.
Selecting metrics
In order to measure success we set up metrics on our "Sign Up" page and in the navigation in the "burger menu". We decided to trial the feature on all users, then measure the conversion rate on the Sign Up page against the same time the previous year.
Creating the variant
We planned out the user journey and divided the design of the feature across the team. Working in bi-weekly sprints we were able to quickly design and prototype the feature, demonstrate it to the Product Owner and stakeholders, hand over to the development team and deliver the initial working model within a few weeks.
UI Design
Navigation
The feature was placed within the "burger menu" and a "hero banner" was used on the website homepage to tie-in with the social media campaign and to direct potential users to where they needed to be.
Onboarding
Using overlays we forced a set of three onboarding messages to help first-time users learn how to use the feature. The user was returned to the feature by either clicking the close icon or the "Get Started" call-to-action.
The "Copy To Clipboard" button
(share method 1)
Users would click on "Copy To Clipboard", open whichever app they decide to use to forward the link (such as a text message, email or WhatsApp) then paste the link into their personal message.
This method was designed to appeal to more experienced users.
The "Invite Friends" button
(share method 2)
Users would click on Invite Friends, which would take them to a page showing all of the contacts on their device, whereby they would select one or more then click again on "Invite Friends". They would then choose an app to use to forward the link and the message would be automatically written for them so that all they would need to do is click on "Send".
This method was designed to appeal to less experienced users.
Testing & Results
Running the test
After we'd set up the feature we ran a test. We assigned a medium-high confidence level since this was a new feature and because we were using a pre-assigned set of referral codes, but still considering that some users may forget to use it.
Using the "personal referral code" assigned to each referee we were able to find out which new customers had registered successfully as a referral and which new customers had arrived at the registration page via another journey and registered in the usual manner.
Analysing the results
Over a period of two weeks in the run up to the Cheltenham Festival and for another week during the festival we were able to see a rise in the number of registrations at William Hill from the registration landing page. We were able to see an increase in registrations of ~20% year-on-year and that ~80% of those were because of the referral feature. This meant that the feature had introduced an overall positive Net effect of ~16%, an extraordinary result.
Summary
By investing time in developing this feature we were able to cover the cost of the investment by increasing the value of each user, in terms of them becoming an integral part in the acquisition of more customers.
The power of social media and the sharing of experiences is profound and by enabling existing customers to directly invite their friends and family to join them in playing at William Hill we were able to increase our chances of acquiring new customers considerably.